• Speech Sciences
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• v.14 no.3
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• pp.7-19
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• 2007

The present study investigated some phonetic attributes which distinguish two Korean stop types $^-aspirated$ and $lax^-$ in a prosodic position which has previously received little attention, namely medial in an accentual phrase. The intonational pattern across syllables which are initial in an accentual phrase (Jun, 1993) is said to depend on the type of stop (aspirated or lax), while that of syllables which are medial in an accentual phrase are not. In Experiment 1, nine native Korean speakers read sentences with a controlled prosodic pattern in which aspirated or lax stops occurred in accentual phrase-medial position. Acoustic analysis revealed significant differences between aspirated and lax stops in closure duration, voice-onset time, and fundamental frequency (F0) values for post-stop vowels. The results indicate that a wider range of acoustic cues distinguish aspirated and lax Korean stops than previously demonstrated. Phonetic and phonological models of consonant-tone interactions for Korean will need to be revised to account for these results.

• Proceedings of the KSPS conference
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• 2007.05a
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• pp.240-242
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• 2007

The goal of this paper is to investigate effects of three prosodic factors, such as phrasal accent (accented vs. unaccented), prosodic boundary (IP-initial vs. IP-medial) and coda voicing (e.g., bed vs. bet), on acoustic realization of English vowels (/i, $_I/$, $/{\varepsilon}$, ${\ae}/$) as produced by native (Canadian) and nonnative (Korean) speakers. The speech corpus included 16 minimal pairs (e.g., bet-bat, bet-bed) embedded in a sentence. Results show that phonological contrast between vowels are maximized when they were accented, though the contrast maximization pattern was not the same between the English and Korean speakers. However, domain-initial position do not affect the phonetic manifestation of vowels. Results also show that phonological contrast due to coda voicing is maximized only when the vowels are accented. These results propose that the phonetic realization of vowels is affected by phrasal accent only, and not by the location within prosodic position.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.9 no.2
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• pp.69-87
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• 2002

This paper investigates how focus contributes to the phonological and phonetic realization of Japanese intonation. Pierrehumbert & Beckman (1988) pointed out that textual prominence results in the H-tone peak raising on the focused item and IP (Intonational Phrase) initiation before the focused item. Similarly Kori (1989) suggested that the F0 peaks on the words after the focused item tend to be suppressed. Although they give a general description of the characteristics of focus phenomena in Japanese intonation, they fail to explain the F0 peak interaction between H phrasal tone and lexically specified pitch accent in more-than-3-mora words whose accent locations varies from early to late. In this paper, we perform the experiment to investigate the following three points. First, we would like to look at the systematic intonational differences between focused and neutral APs; specifically, focused APs, either accented or unaccented, are compared with the neutral counterparts in terms of F0 pattern. Second, we investigate F0 patterns of a focused AP with more than 3 morae, as the accent of the word varies from early to late. Since an AP with a late accent has a H- on the second mora as well as H*+L on its accent mora, it is expected that these peaks will show systematic F0 pattern when it is focused. Our third concern is F0 patterns of a post focus AP with more than 3 morae, that is, whether a post-focus word is dephrased or just downstepped as the word accent location varies from early to late. This paper is significant in that it tries to clarify the F0 peak interaction between H-and lexical pitch accent H*+L in a variety of focus contexts in Japanese intonation.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.18 no.1E
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• pp.27-31
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• 1999

Recent linguistic researches have brought into focus the relations between prosodic structures and syntactic, semantic or phonological structures. Most of them prove that prosodic information is available for understanding syntactic, semantic and discourse structures. But this result has not been integrated yet into recent Korean speech recognition or understanding systems. This study, as a part of integrating prosodic information into the speech recognition system, proposes an automatic detection technique of Korean accentual phrase boundaries by using one-stage DP, and the normalized pitch pattern. For making the normalized pitch pattern, this study proposes a method of modified normalization for Korean spoken language. For the experiment, this study employs 192 sentential speech data of 12 men's voice spoken in standard Korean, in which 720 accentual phrases are included, and 74.4% of the accentual phrase boundaries are correctly detected while 14.7% are the false detection rate.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.14 no.1
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• pp.21-35
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• 2007

This paper attempts to investigate phonetic substances of the stress patterns of English compounds and noun phrases, showing that the theoretically derived stress structures are not consistent with the accentual patterns in real utterances. Even though it has been long claimed that compounds have the stress pattern [1 3] and that noun phrases, [2 1] as in Chomsky & Halle (1968), their difference has not been yet explored empirically or phonetically. I present a phonetic experiment conducted to see if there is any difference along the tonal contours, mostly focusing on their pitch accent distribution. 36 different compounds and 36 different noun phrases included in carrier sentences were examined, and they were varied in position within a sentence. Results showed that various accentual patterns were produced, and among them, [H* X] predominantly occurs in all three positions in both compounds and noun phrases, whereas the patterns [X H*] and [X X] appear relatively more frequently in final position than in initial and medial position. Furthermore, the pattern [Ac + No], in which the preceding element is pitch-accented with no accent on the following one, is the major stress pattern in both compounds and noun phrases and in all three sentence positions. This suggests that there seems to be no difference in accentual patterns between compounds and noun phrases, which is not consistent with the hypothesis. The results are interpreted as saying that the preceding element alone tends to be prominent with no accent following it both in compounds and noun phrases, and that therefore, theoretically speculated phonological claims are not always phonetically supported.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.6 no.4
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• pp.53-65
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• 2014

The current research examines whether pitch contour shapes in North Kyungsang pitch accent contrasts provide a phonetic dimension for phonological discreteness in a mimicry task. Two pitch accent continua resynthesized were created for HH vs. HL and HH vs. LH. To confirm a phonetic dimension for accounting for pitch accent categories in North Kyungsang Korean, the mimicries of speakers of two dialects (i.e., North Kyungsang & South Cholla) were compared. One of the findings showed that, for North Kyungsang speakers, the range of mean f0 peak times was a phonetic dimension undergoing a continuous shift within a stimulus continuum for both HH vs. HL and HH vs. LH. On the other hand, for South Cholla speakers, there were no apparent shifts around categorical boundaries for either HH vs. HL or HH vs. LH. Regarding individual mimicries on f0 peak timing, there are many variations. For HH vs. LH, three North Kyungsang speakers showed a discrete pattern reflecting a shift in phonological categories, but for HH vs. HL, there was no such distinction showing a categorical shift, though there were statistically significant differences for two speakers. Interestingly, one of the North Kyungsang speakers showed a continuous phonetic dimension for both HH vs. HL and HH vs. LH. Lastly, the f0 valley timing did not exhibit a discrete or gradient phonetic dimension for speakers of either dialect. On the basis of these results, what is interesting is that the tonal target such as high tone in North Kyungsang pitch accent categories within the autosegmental-metrical (AM) theory may be realized within individual cognitive systems for representing the interaction of perception and production.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.6
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• pp.7-24
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• 1999

Eleven Korean learners of English took part in an experiment where the production and perception of English /r/ and /l/ in four different word positions was investigated. Overall the subjects made more errors on /l/ in both production and identification tests. The frequency of the subjects' errors was also sensitive to word positions in which the two English liquids occur. Especially the subjects made noticeably fewer errors in intervocalic medial position. It is suggested that the Korean subjects' acquisitional pattern in this particular case of foreign phone learning can be explained more by language particular 'interference' effects rather than 'universal' acoustic arguments such as those given in Dissosway et a1. (1982) and Sheldon and Strange (1982). The results of the experiment also support the minority position among second language educators that in some cases of non-native phone acquisition, learners' production abilities can be developed earlier than their perceptual abilities.

• Proceedings of the KSPS conference
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• 2007.05a
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• pp.173-175
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• 2007

The lexical decision task (LDT) commonly postulates the activation of semantic level. However, there are few studies for the feedback effect from semantic level. The purpose of the present study is to investigate whether the feedback effect from semantic level is facilitatory or inhibitory in Korean LDT. In Experiment 1, we manipulated the number of phonological syllable neighbors (PSN) and the number of semantic neighbors (SEN) orthogonally while orthographic syllable neighbor (OSN) is dense. In the results, the significant facilitatory effect was shown in words with many SEN. In Experiment 2, we examined same conditions as Experiment 1 but OSN was sparse. Although the similar lexical decision latency pattern was shown, there was no statistical significance. These results can be explained by the feedback activation from semantic level. If a target has many SENs and many PSNs, it receives more feedback activation from semantic level than a target with few SENs and PSNs.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.16 no.1
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• pp.49-55
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• 2024

This study aims to develop a three-sentence speech screening test to evaluate speech development in 4-year-old children and provide standards for comparison with peers. Screening tests were conducted on 24 children each in the first and second halves of 4 years old. The screening test results showed a correlation of .7 with the existing speech disorder evaluation test results. We compared whether there was a difference between the two groups of 4-year-old in the phonological development indicators and error patterns obtained through the screening test. The developmental indicators of the children in the second half were high, but there were no statistically significant differences. The Korean Speech Sound Analysis Tool (KSAT) was used for all analyses, and the automatic analysis results and contents of the clinician's manual analysis were compared. The degree of agreement between the automatic and manual error pattern analyses was 93.63%. The significance of this study is that the standard of speech of a 4-year-old child of the speech screening test according to three sentences at the level of elicited sentences, and the applicability of the KSAT were reviewed in both clinical and research fields.

• Proceedings of the KSPS conference
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• 1996.10a
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• pp.246-246
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• 1996

Purpose: Some of the properties of the prosodic phrasing and some acoustic and phonological effects of contrastive focus on the tonal pattern of Seoul Korean is explored based on a brief experiment of analyzing the fundamental frequency(=FO) contour of the speech of the author. Data Base and Analysis Procedures: The examples were chosen to contain mostly nasal and liquid consonants, since it is difficult to track down the formants in stops and fricatives during their corresponding consonantal intervals and stops may yield an effect of unwanted increase in the FO value due to their burst into the following vowel. All examples were recorded three times and the spectrum of the most stable repetition was generated, from which the FO contour of each sentence was obtained, the peaks with a value higher than 250Hz being interpreted as a high tone (=H). The result is then discussed within the prosodic hierarchy framework of Selkirk (1986) and compared with the tonal pattern of the Northern Kyungsang dialect of Korean reported in Kenstowicz & Sohn (1996). Prosodic Phrasing: In N.K. Korean, H never appears both on the object and on the verb in a neutral sentence, which indicates the object and the verb form a single Phonological Phrase ($={\phi}$), given that there is only one pitch peak for each $={\phi}$. However, Seoul Korean shows that both the object and the verb have H of their own, indicating that they are not contained in one $={\phi}$. This violates the Optimality constraint of Wrap-XP (=Enclose a lexical head and its arguments in one $={\phi}$), while N.K. Korean obeys the constraint by grouping a VP in a single $={\phi}$. This asymmetry can be resolved through a constraint that favors the separate grouping of each lexical category and is ranked higher than Wrap-XP in Seoul Korean but vice versa in N.K. Korean; $Align-x^{lex}$ (=Align the left edge of a lexical category with that of a $={\phi}$). (1) nuna-ka manll-ll mEk-nIn-ta ('sister-NOM garlic-ACC eat-PRES-DECL') a. (LLH) (LLH) (HLL) ----Seoul Korean b. (LLH) (LLL LHL) ----N.K. Korean Focus and Phrasing: Two major effects of contrastive focus on phonological phrasing are found in Seoul Korean: (a) the peak of an Intonatioanl Phrase (=IP) falls on the focused element; and (b) focus has the effect of deleting all the following prosodic structures. A focused element always attracts the peak of IP, showing an increase of approximately 30Hz compared with the peak of a non-focused IP. When a subject is focused, no H appears either on the object or on the verb and a focused object is never followed by a verb with H. The post-focus deletion of prosodic boundaries is forced through the interaction of StressFocus (=If F is a focus and DF is its semantic domain, the highest prominence in DF will be within F) and Rightmost-IP (=The peak of an IP projects from the rightmost $={\phi}$). First Stress-F requires the peak of IP to fall on the focused element. Then to avoid violating Rightmost-IP, all the boundaries after the focused element should delete, minimizing the number of $={\phi}$'s intervening from the right edge of IP. (2) (omitted) Conclusion: In general, there seems to be no direct alignment constraints between the syntactically focused element and the edge of $={\phi}$ determined in phonology; all the alignment effects come from a single requirement that the peak of IP projects from the rightmost $={\phi}$ as proposed in Truckenbrodt (1995).